Archives for May 2014

#SenseiSherlock hung out with the nice folks in the registration booth while Sharon and John lectured on practical cybersecurity steps for lawyers at the ABA Professional Responsibility Conference in Long Beach CA.

In the May 22nd edition of Slaw, Canada’s online legal magazine, Ms. Nelson and Mr. Simek highlight details learned at a recent conference led by Mark Jacobsen of Findlaw, regarding search engine optimization for lawyers.

Branded searches account for 38% of all law firm searches. That means that someone already knows about the firm, someone in it or another aspect of its brand. If someone is looking for your firm they should be able to find you with a branded search.

The other 62% of the searches are not branded. This is where things get interesting. Most attorneys think that if they can be found for the “head-term phrases” (such as Northern Virginia Personal Injury Attorney) that is the key to the firm’s success, but this will waste a lot of money to be found for those phrases on search engine results (SERPs).

People are actually searching and doing research for what are called “long tail searches with lawyer intent”. These are very specific and provide more details for the search. Due to the sheer volume of searches the click through rate is low, but these result in 66.9% of non-branded visits to your site. The long-tail searchers will end up visiting the site 31.8% of the time and the head-term searchers will visit about 1.3% of the time.

The contact rates (what you are trying to get on the site) are greatly improved by using the long-tailed queries, so work on the specific areas that individuals will be searching for and not paying to be found for the generic phrases.

Sad but true. You are likely to get a message that says something like “Your Android phone viewed illegal porn. To unlock it, pay a $300 fine.” And they are not kidding – your phone is disabled. It is known as the Koler.A Trojan. The malware prevents users from accessing the home screen of their phones, making it impossible to use most other apps installed on the phone. The normal phone functions in some cases can be restored only when the user pays a “fine” of about $300, using untraceable payment mechanisms such as Paysafecard or uKash. Read more here.

Ms. Nelson and Mr. Simek are quoted in the article titled, “Sex-obsessed bureaucrats threaten nation’s security with porn-surfing habits” of the May 11th edition of The Washington Times.

Federal government workers are spending valuable time visiting dating web sites and viewing pornography while “on the clock”. These porn sites pose a serious security risk to multiple agencies of the government. The GSA, the Treasury Department, the Postal Service, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other agencies have all had investigations into employees viewing pornography. Recently, congressional lawmakers heard about an EPA official, that is still employed, who spent up to six hours a day looking at porn.

Sharon Nelson says, “It’s a big problem everywhere”.

The risk to the government is that the cybercriminals are interested in spreading viruses that can attack servers and even send mass messages via e-mail to other members within the agency. Ms. Nelson also said, “If they give away free porn and they can inject malware, they can make a lot more money from the information they derive.”

John Simek, a computer forensics analyst, said a basic technique to block pornography in the workplace bans certain sites, but using a proxy server is an easy way to circumvent the technique.

Many subjects told investigators that they did their work but “…use the computer for personal use to pass the time.”

On February 12th of 2008, the FBI announced that it had hired Lockheed Martin to build its Next Generation Identification system (NGI) to deploy multimodal matching to biometric data of US citizens. Today, NGI’s database contains several types of unique identifiers including fingerprints, iris prints, and facial recognition. On this episode of Digital Detectives, hosts Sharon Nelson and John Simek interview Jennifer Lynch from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Together they discuss false identifications, mandatory background checks, and the First Amendment right to be anonymous. Tune in to learn more about EFF’s FOIA request and how the FBI is using the data of the innocent to look for guilty parties.

Jennifer Lynch is a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to defending civil liberties in the digital world. At EFF, Jennifer works on privacy issues in new technologies such as biometrics, domestic drones, and location tracking devices. She successfully sued the Federal Aviation Administration and Customs and Border Protection to obtain thousands of pages of previously unpublished drone records and has testified about facial recognition and its Fourth Amendment implications before the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law.

There are a multitude of technology options to help run small firms and solo practices, but deciding on which ones can be a daunting endeavor. Mac vs. PC, practice management systems, and encryption of client data are among numerous issues attorneys must resolve. On this episode of The Digital Edge, hosts Sharon Nelson and Jim Calloway interview John Simek from Sensei Enterprises. Together, they discuss modern innovations that make running firms easier and keep client data safe. Tune in to learn more about meta data, benefits of paperless, and John’s favorite software tools.

John Simek is the vice president of Sensei Enterprises, a digital forensics, information technology and information security firm located in Fairfax, Virginia. He is a co-author of The 2014 Solo and Small Firm Legal Technology Guide: Critical Decisions Made Simple, published by the American Bar Association along with many other books on technology, security and electronic evidence. John is a testifying expert and holds many technical certifications. He’s also a co-host on another Legal Talk Network podcast, the Digital Detectives.

Excerpt: Branded searches account for 38% of all searches for law firm websites. In other words, they already know your firm, someone in it or some other aspect of its brand. Any competent SEO provider should be able to get you traffic for branded search.

But 62% of searches are non-branded. This is where the fight for results gets bloody. Most lawyers suffer from the misconception that “head-term phrases” (such as divorce attorney Los Angeles) is key to success and they waste a lot of money trying to get those phrases to come up on the search engine results (SERPs).

In the May 9, 2014 edition of Attorney at Work, Ms. Nelson and Mr. Simek provide five password protection tips to reduce online security risks.

If you do receive notification that a password has been exposed, the first thing you should do is confirm that the notice is authentic and not some type of phishing tactic. Once the notice has been confirmed, follow the instructions to reset the password.

The second tip is to always use a strong password. It should be at least 14 characters with a mixture of upper and lower case letters with numbers and special characters. Lawyers can use a password generator to create complex passwords.

There are apps or software to manage all those passwords. Ms. Nelson prefers to use eWallet by iLium Software. The data is held in an encrypted vault and does not go onto the cloud.

Two-factor authentication (which is something that you have, such as an ID badge, smartphone, watch or USB fob), with the combination of the password is the future of online security, according to John Simek. Biometrics are a temporary solution, because if your digital fingerprint is compromised it is tough to get a new finger.

Some of the techniques that you should not use are to store all of your passwords on a device and label them “passwords”. The second technique that should not be used is to tape the password to the bottom of the laptop. John Simek has seen this used on multiple occasions.